Yup, I’m still doing a lot of work on Ridiculous Space Battles, and recently did a new trailer and took new screenshots, and may even start running ads again… but in the meantime I do a lot of fussing about investments and finance…because I weirdly enjoy that sort of thing.
Somehow, I have ended up a sort of small hedge-fund manager. Its a very small hedge, but its my hedge, and I get to do what I want with it. I know a lot of people who did well from video games who then naturally use that money to make more games, or bigger games, or who publish a bunch of games by other developers. Actually for a while I did that, and published four games by other devs. Its a totally reasonably strategy. The video games business is so hit focused that to be honest the only approach that makes any sort of strategic financial sense is to go for the portfolio model, where you publish ten games and hope that the one hit pays for the nine flops (and this does seem to be the case). However, for me this approach has one huge enormous weakness (in fact two… but I’ll come back to that) – Its a lot of people management,.
I am terrible at dealing with people.
I am not whining about it. Everyone gets a random character-sheet at the start of life, and the attributes that got maxxed out for me have enabled very cool and lucrative career in IT and then video games. The flipside is that some of my attributes are very low and in need of buffs. But given we do not get to re-roll our dice on this, I am just trying to deal with the fact that I will never be someone with a big long list of employees or business partners. Thats never going to work out for me, or for them. I am not easy to deal with.
So here we are, with me managing investments in things instead of a larger games business. I still *make* games, but its just me, using stock bought art, or AI generated art, and even re-using music from a previous game. Its what maximises the fun for me, and minimises the stress. It does mean however, that I have a side-line in fussing with investing the money that my company made. And I did *try* to invest in in tangible things. I built a solar farm! (and may build another), but in the meantime I am invested in about 50 different companies/bonds/funds/trusts, and that takes a lot of time to manage.
I’ve made money, I’ve lost money, and everything inbetween. I made a killing on Tesla stock before he went mad, then a similar killing on Nvidia before Jensen started talking about spaceborne data-centers and financing their customers. I’ve had some big misses too. My bets on Chinese EV manufacturers ran into issues with a china price-war. I am still trying to wait that one out… But the reason I thought I would write about it is that I have used LLMs a LOT in deciding where and how to invest and it is AMAZING.
In a prior life, I worked for a company called Datastream/ICV, which was a stock market data IT company that provided research material and real time market information via satelite to stockbrokers and banks. It was really interesting. Because I tended to support the legacy datastream stuff, I went to a lot of the research offices for the big banks. These were not ‘wolf of wall street’ offices, but more boring, muc quieter rooms full of dozens of serious looking people reading financial reports, reading the news, reading in depth technical analysis… and then eventually preparing reports and summaries so that the actual traders could have some insight into if a company was over/under valued.
It was a lot of work, and clearly very important, and clearly had a good ROI.
And now its almost all irrelevant.
Talking to Claude/Mythos about financial stuff is a revelation. Its SO GOOD at this stuff. All the headlines focus on its unusually good cybersecurity capabilities, but I think thats just because it makes a scary headline. Hearing that 50,000 financial analysts may lose their jobs over the next year isn’t as sexy as Chinese Hackers blowing up the pentagon using their keyboards. I think anybody who has sat and had a long conversation with Claude about whether investment A is better than B, (and why, and what the potential risks were, and what dates to watch, and if your personal investment thesis on that stock holds up to scrutiny) will come away thinking ‘holy fuck this is good stuff’.
I know a TON of really skeptical people who think AI is useless. Almost always they have tried ChatGPT3 a few times, or read a free Gemini summary and think ‘they know all about it’. But a decent LLM is NOT a search engine. Its a research assistant. And when you treat it like that, its incredible. And sure, hallucinations are not solved, and AI can make mistakes. And Claude will make mistakes, but its still, in my experience, an order of magnitude better than any financial website / forum / discord that you can find.
Have you ever actually tried READING an article on Seeking Alpha or TipRanks? The web is not exactly filled with well argued deep impartial analysis on investment topics. Its a trainwreck of hype, clickbait and poorly-informed bullshit. And sure, if you read 25 articles about lithium prices, you *will* at the end of it have some proper understanding of whats going on, but you will wade trough so much nonsense to get there, that it makes perfect sense why the traders farmed all that out to the people in the research room.
Claude will do the same job, reading those 25 articles, searching for deeper context where those articles micht give conflicting data, search further on any topics raised by those articles, then compile it into a concise but pretty accurate report on the topic you asked about. Its especially good at answering the question “If I invest in this specific stock/fund, what am I really betting on here?”. Claude has convinced me to sell a bunch of investments I thought I understood well, but did not. Its recommendation have been extremely extremely good .
I am not a financial advisor, but I’m also not a guy trying to sell you anything. I’m just writing this to share my experience. If you have a pension, or savings and investments and feel unsure if you are invested in the right thing, then I strongly recommend just talking to a PAID premium SOTA LLM and asking it to push back on your choices. And yes, you can just say “DO not patronize me or tell me I am clever, give it to me straight” and they do. In fact I may have gone overboard with these instructions to Claude, which often says things like “Cliff, you are making the same strategic mistake here we have discussed many times before”. I find it kinda funny.
Anyway, give it a go. Its great at this stuff, and WAY better than that bloke in the pub who thinks he knows all about the markets. Even if that bloke is me :D.